1438 County Road.
Du Gang and his group moved along this road in the small vehicle. The journey had been smooth with less obstacles across the middle of the road. Whenever they ran into an impassable road, Du Gang would get off the vehicle to clear the way.
“Can you not smoke?”
Du Gang sat in the passenger seat with a helpless face and turned to look at Chu Zixuan sitting behind him.
Chu Zixuan sat in the back seat, on the right side of the window. He tilted half of his body outward and rested his elbow on the lowered window, hanging his arm outside. In that hand was a lit cigarette dangling between two fingers.
“I’m stressed out. The nicotine inside the cigarette can alleviate the pressure in my heart…” Chu Zixuan said with a straight face.
The others in the vehicle were angry and helpless. They thought that Chu Zixuan was a calm and aloof person. They didn’t expect him to have such a fragile side.
“No, even if you’re stressed, you can’t smoke cigarettes one after another, right? Don’t you know that smoking is harmful to your health?”
Du Gang was entirely speechless. He didn’t know where Chu Zixuan found a bunch of cigarette packs from. Since the vehicle started moving, he hadn’t stopped.
“This is how it is with the world. Do you think I can live safely up to 99 years old?”
His words left the group at a loss for words again. Everyone felt a little depressed. Du Gang shook his head and sighed: “Forget it, just don’t exhale the smoke inside the car!”
Du Gang said and left him alone. He looked ahead with listless eyes. It was apparent that he was pondering about something else.
Apart from An Ya focused on driving the car, the rest also fell into silence, thinking about whether the world would return to peace.
But none of them noticed that every time Chu Zixuan puffed the cigarette, the smoke didn’t enter his lungs, but wandered around in his mouth for a while before he spat it out again.
Even if they noticed, they probably couldn’t tell, because the other five present were non-smokers.
Meanwhile, every time Chu Zixuan smoked, he turned his head out the window as if he wanted to keep the smoke out of the car.
However, each time he held the cigarette to his mouth, a red crystal would float secretly into his mouth from his palm.
In the wild, buildings were sparse. Most insects couldn’t find cover in time and ended up lying on both sides of the road. Du Gang and his group didn’t exit the vehicle to wipe them out as they were in a hurry.
But Chu Zixuan was different. His supernatural power was psychokinesis, which could extend as far as the range of his spiritual power.
He could sneakily manipulate the daggers to cut open the insects and extract the crystals.
At first, his spiritual power only had a distance of 30 meters square, so he could only perform this operation secretly.
But when he swallowed enough crystals, his body advanced after a shiver!
Not only did the distance of his straight-line spiritual power detection reach 10,000 meters, but the detection diameter centered on him also extended to 100 meters.
Under normal circumstances, with him as the center of the circle, a spherical space with a diameter of 100 meters was all that his spiritual power could cover, and it was also the area that he could skillfully use his psychokinesis to manipulate objects.
He disguised himself as smoking, while privately harvesting crystals from the insect carcasses laying on the roadside. Just like that, he swallowed the crystals in front of everyone without being noticed.
In this situation, Chu Zixuan would grow even more if he acted on his own.
But like he said to Du Gang, he also felt that this doomsday wasn’t as simple as they had imagined. He would live a very exhausting life if he were all alone.
And if he was with Du Gang, no matter what happened, his identity as a spiritual detector would give him a relatively safe distance and enough time to think about the ins and outs.
Despite that, he wasn’t that willing to share the crystals with others, so his only choice was to swallow the crystals this way.
However, he believed that even if Du Gang found out about this matter, the latter probably wouldn’t be vocal because his value was far greater than the others present…
Little by little, Chu Zixuan’s spiritual power increased and his strength also became stronger.
Screech!
While he soaked in the enjoyment of consuming the crystals, the car suddenly braked, interrupting his activity of eating a solo meal.
“What’s wrong?”
Chu Zixuan, who had been focusing on disguising himself and manipulating the knife to harvest the crystals, didn’t notice the road condition in front of the car.
“The road is blocked!”
Du Gang casually answered and got out of the car to check the situation.
The others witnessed the situation and also stepped out of the vehicle. Du Gang and An Ya were comfortable in their own seats, but the four people in the back had crowded together and felt somewhat uncomfortable. They used this chance to get off for some fresh air.
“What’s this situation?”
In front of their car was a small bridge that could fit the width of three cars. It was blocked by a pile of sandbags that were stacked up as high as a person.
“It seems to be deliberately piled up by someone!”
Chu Zixuan looked around, pointed to a village house on the right, and said: “Maybe the sandbags are piled up by the villagers there. They must have…”
Suddenly, he was taken aback. His spiritual power had been wandering around the place, and from the moment he got off the vehicle, he felt that something was amiss. But now, he finally realized it.
“There are no insects in this village!”
After the others heard his words, they looked around, and sure enough, there wasn’t a single insect seen around the village. The place was clean and none of the village buildings had been destroyed.
Just when the crowd was surprised, suddenly, a voice came from inside the village.
“What are you people doing?”
Along with this voice, a group of villagers showed themselves.
They suddenly appeared out of this seemingly empty village, each carrying hoes, shovels, and other agricultural tools in their hands.
Chu Zixuan and the rest subconsciously gathered behind Du Gang, looking at them with a wary face.
Perhaps Du Gang’s height of 1.95 meters and his strong muscles gave the crowd a very huge deterrent effect.
The villagers stopped just five to six meters away from the group and surrounded them from afar.
A man who looked like the village chief stepped forward, saying: “We are the villagers of Heavenly Stone Village. What are you doing here?”
The group knew that they were local villagers just by looking at their outfits.
“We came from Nan Yuan City and were going to Xing Yuan County. But we found the bridge blocked when we got here!”
At such a moment, it wasn’t possible for Du Gang to disguise himself as an underling anymore, so he could only stand out and explain.
“No crossing!”
“You can’t cross here!”
As soon as his words sounded, the villagers shouted one after another, waving the farming tools in their hands with obvious threatening intent.
Du Gang puckered his brows, not understanding why these villagers were doing this.
He subconsciously glanced at Chu Zixuan and found that his eyes were listless. That was when he immediately understood that Chu Zixuan was going all out in scanning the area. Du Gang said: “This county road and bridge are owned and repaired by the state. They are facilities that are free to the public. We are all legal citizens who pay taxes and fees every year, so we have the right to cross the bridge!”
As a matter of fact, he wasn’t in much of a hurry to cross the bridge. As opposed to these people disallowing them to cross the bridge, he was more interested in knowing why there weren’t any insects in this village!
On the other hand, it was apparent that Chu Zixuan also noticed it and was looking for the reason, so he was happy to fool around with these people for a while and drag for some time.